Evernote For Android Gets Smarter – Now Takes Dictation Too!

Evernote has been a great way to take or carry around your digital notes. Be it an audio or image or a clipped webpage, Evernote offers a nice way to collect them and keep the notebook in sync across all your devices. The Evernote client for Android just got better with the new speech to text feature that enables you to take notes just by recording anyone’s dictations.

Tap the icon to create a new note and in the toolbar below long-press the audio note tool (which you previously used for adding audio notes). You will notice a new icon (mic in a speech bubble) popping out. Select it and the audio tool icon will be replaced with it. Once you are ready to take a note, tap the new speech-to-text icon and start talking. The tool promises to detect the words and auto-fill the text description of your note or the title depending on where the typing pointer is set. This also appends the recorded audio to the note for further reference.

However, like any other app that uses the speech to text feature, Evernote (for Android) also has serious limitations regarding the pronunciations it can interpret. As you can see from the screenshot above, the words I exactly uttered for the title and description are “Hello this is awesome” and “You can now dictate to take notes with Evernote for Android“. I do not possess a perfect news-reading accent but I can speak words that are easily comprehensible for any average literate. Considering that fact, the note taking accuracy for the app is impressive.

However, the introduction of the feature is quite relevant to the context of the app. The newly added feature is quite a help if you are someone who need to take notes now and then. No matter how handy your phone’s keyboard is or how big the screen is, someone taking dictations for you is always a relief.

Apart from the improvements made in the main app the Evernote homescreen widget for Android also got updated with new customize-able skins and widget elements. You can get them here. The updates were meant for the ICS (Android 4) phones although it worked fine for my Gingerbread device too.